I am an alien. I come in peace.

I’ve heard many writers over the years say that sharing their work with others is like having strangers evaluate their children. Now, I’m not a mother. I don’t have kids that strangers can make snap judgments on or praise. I do, however, have siblings. I’ve heard them get judged. Be it by strangers, friends or boyfriends, the lesson is instantly learned that the fastest way to piss Nicole off is find fault in her brothers.

With that in mind, I am in complete agreement that having my writing evaluated is much the same as having my brothers put on an Olympus-high pedestal. I imagine them surrounded by this human frenzy, just like Brad Pitt would be by the media. The media doesn’t tend to be kind does it? The media, with all their cameras flashes and their screaming questions and their prying impropriety, they put the STORY first and the PERSON second.

I have found that writing groups tend to do the same. For nearly a year now, I’ve been an active member of what we’ll call the P.I. I have workshopped perhaps a dozen times, taking from a myriad of my works and with nearly always the same result. This may ring a familiar bell if you’ve read my past posts, but I am continually accused of the same set of mistakes:

(1) Male characters that are too close to their male best friends.

(2) Male characters that sound too feminine

(3) Male friendships that might as well be gay

(4) Unrealistic family dynamics

Over time, I’ve learned that much of my style and the choices I make in relation to it are due to my upbringing. I was raised atheist. I was raised homeschooled. I was raised by attachment parents. I was raised to be friends with my brothers. These things place me in several minority groups, but put them all together? The way I see it, you can either view a person/author as unique as that as an impossible to read writer OR as a writer with an advantage. Who else out there in that highly competitive literary field is going to have my background? Who else would be able to write tales with characters such as mine, with layers belonging to minority groups that rarely overlap? This is a niche. I have an IN on something that many writers believe to be extinct; an original idea. So what if the dozen times I workshopped with the P.I. I was told my male characters and their relationships were unbelievable and unrelatable? Maybe that was just because it was a style they hadn’t been faced with before. What if everything they saw as off the mark in my novels, they discovered to also be true of me? Siblings that are close enough to be friends? Homeschoolers that are atheists? Parents and their adult children actually WANTING to camp together? Those aliens DO exist. I am one and don’t you dare try and throw my family off that Olympus-high pedestal. We’re happy there with our lightning-bolts and our green antennae. (Have I taken the metaphor too far yet?)

It took me a long time to come to these terms. I kept reading my favorite authors, (Robin Thurman and Sara Reese-Brennan) and not understanding why they had such followings when they did so many of the same things I did. My epiphany started when I looked at the Amazon reviews of those two favorites. Guess what? They were torn down for what I loved them for! They were faulted for their niche, for being the aliens in a sea of regular, just out of the plastic-wrap-humans.

My mother has a thought on why this is. When kids are in school, they are graded, on everything. They don’t get told, “this and this was right. This beginning was good, but this part drags a bit. You might want to build this up a bit, but this right here, THIS is your strength.” No. In school, they got told “this is wrong. That is wrong. Fix it and bring it back. You can do better. You’re miles behind everybody else here.” They were never taught to soften their blows or to sugarcoat because their teachers sure as hell never did. Compliments were few and far between. How many red pens did they see in comparison to gold stars? Could THAT be why I walked away from all my workshops thinking, “wow. I really suck. Maybe I should rethink this writing thing and take up guitar. My mother always said my fingers move like a conductors.” (She has said that) I was homeschooled. There weren’t any stars but the ones we studied in the sky and the only pens were the ones I wrote my first stories with. If you don’t nurture talent and instead just poke at it with your red pens, how is a person expected to try, try and try again? (As the idiom goes?)

Of course, here’s the penultimate question. If you’re a member of a writing group and you want actual help, do you WANT sugarcoating? Do you want the blows softened? Do you want that media hoard to put the STORY first or the AUTHOR first?

Don’t worry. I’m still thinking on that one.

On the verge of deciding this was just how my writing was and that like with Thurman and Brennan, I’d have a smaller following, I decided to try an experiment. I would workshop one more time with P.I. but this time, I’d do it under a male pseudonym. Up until the moment my reviewers all sat down with me to talk, they’d have thought what they read was written by a man. This would help to dispel any suspicion that there was a gender bias, that perhaps many of the issues found in my writing could be attributed to people disbelieving a female could write from a male POV. If you read the opening paragraph to a story and you’ve already seen the author is female, won’t you automatically assume the protagonist will match?

Good news? The experiment worked. They believed in Jacob (the pseudonym chosen for me...and huh, having just finished LOST, that’s funny) and better yet, they thought the main characters were male. There wasn’t any femininity. The main male friendship was believable. Yes, the family dynamic was still alien, (one even said creepy. Creepy? REALLY?) but the goal had been met. The bad news? Everything else sucked. “The premise is good,” I was told. “The base idea is appealing.” But everything else? All the details, world-building, humor, in-jokes, metaphors, pacing, theme? NOTHING WORKED? Really? See, I just find that impossible to believe.

Now, I would never do this, but hell if I’m not tempted. I want to take a chapter from Rob Thurman or Reese-Brennan or Stephen King or hell, even my mother and take it to the P.I. I want to see if they tear it apart, suggesting that perhaps it is not the WRITING that always, always has little to salvage, but the REVIEWERS? Just a thought.

Even with the epiphany that I like the writer I am, I still kept my writing close to the chest. Sure, I read the occasional line to my mother (like zombie heads rolling down a cliffside, chomping at ankles as they went rolling by) and sure, I posted some stories online and got some amazing reviews and finally, yeah, I had some books available on Amazon. I’ve been telling people for the past year, I don’t write to be famous. I obviously don’t write to be popular.  I don’t even advertise. I write for me and because not to, would be like saying I don’t love my family. I’d be betraying myself.

My characters, however, want to be heard. Even without my playing a role, any role really, they’re managing to scream loud enough to get attention. A family friend who lives in Kona, Hawaii, (whom I stayed with) bought my book I Am Not a Hero all by herself and loved it. In fact, it was her very FIRST vampire story. (You know, THAT means something to me) Next, my mom read that very same book of mine and guess what? She was impressed! She would text me at work as she hit different surprises or wondered on different mysteries and then told me she shrieked in the middle of Origins cafe when she hit the major twist! (My mom, queen of figuring out twists, writing-goddess and bookworm-of the universe, SHE was impressed!) Finishing it, she posted my novel to Facebook, causing two OTHERS to buy it! The creator of P.I even invited me to have a profile on the website, calling me one of the groups “most prolific writers.”

Below is a photograph of me at the Oregon Country Fair. This is the first time I ever attempted to sell my book for money. I didn’t invest a lot in it. These are the free copies I got for completing National Novel Writing Month. I threw them down on this blanket, put up little signs and beamed as people came up to browse. In all honesty, just having them LOOK was worth everything. I felt almost like a traveling gypsy displaying her wares to other nomads. Nobody bought one, but alas, selling one was not the point. While I did trade a copy to a lady in exchange for some cool patches, (“sometimes I wrestle with my demons and sometimes we just snuggle”) the moment that really drove the point home was at the booth I was camping behind. It was night. I was sitting out front in a camping chair with the friend I’d come to see. But behind me, behind the curtain, two of the others were reading aloud to each other. One had her head tipped back, the other read from my book. How funny it was (not funny as in funny, but funny as in profound) to hear my words from another’s person’s tongue.

From an Olympus-high pedestal to the ears of others, the voices of my characters are demanding to be heard even without my consent. How does that old idiom go? “Lead your characters, follow them or get the hell out of their way?” Eh, close enough for this alien.